24 Hawaii. A taxi pulls up and the drIver leans out the window and says some- thing like "Are you Mitch Miller?" and he always says yes. Then the taxi- driver always says "Hi, Mitch" and I ' " H . M M O ll " waves t s never 1, r. 1 er. Even out there, it's "Hi, Mitch." Three Hltndred and Fifty POltnds per Sqltare Inch M OST parrots are smart. They can learn a lot of tricks. Many of them are gorgeous. Whether they know what they are saying is a moot point. We went up to the Bronx Zoo the other afternoon to see its Wild- life Theatre Bird Show. Seven parrots were seated on perches on an outdoor stage awaiting the moment when they would be pUt through their paces, for the twenty-third time that week; they do five shows a day, seven days a week. About two hundred and fifty chIldren sat on wooden benches eating ice cream and watching the parrots. The parrots turned around and around on their perches, sometimes horizontally (about- face) and sometImes vertically (delicate balance). As we stood at one side of the stage, we spoke with Valerie Johnson, a young woman with below-shoulder- length blond hair, who is the parrots' trainer, and she told us that the parrots were of four types-there were four macaws, an African gray parrot, a yel- low-shouldered Amazon parrot, and a cockatoo-and also that their names were Lucifer, Robert, Dudley, Juliet, Oh Bird, Romeo, and Cookie. The par- rots dIdn't say much while they were waiting to perform. Before long, Miss Johnson put a stout leather glove on her left hand- as protection against the parrots' bills and sharp talons-and stepped onto the stage. "All these birds were donated to the zoo by owners who couldn't take care of them anymore," she told the children. "When we get them, some of them are beyond help, because they've become so vicious. It's important to re- member that parrots are wild creatures. Please don't climb onto the stage-it distracts the birds. Sometimes people take parrots home, and for a while they're nice to the parrots. Then they start neglectIng the parrots, and the parrots grow lonely. Or else the people tease the parrots and teach them to bite their fingers. You could lose a finger that way-a parrot's bIll can close with a force of three hundred and fifty pounds per square inch. In the jungle, a parrot's cries carry for miles. Please stay off the stage. You may think of parrots as nice pets. Well they could be pets if you didn't care about your furnI- ture, or if you didn't have any neigh- bors. It's a shame that parrots are brought into this country at all, because out of every six parrots taken from the jungle only one survives. See this?" She held up some scarred scraps of wood. "Robert and Dudley ripped this chair apart with their bills." Miss Johnson put the parrots through h 0 . L 0 f O d " H 11 " t elr routInes. UCI er sal , e o. Oh Bird whistled. Dudley cracked nuts and put their shells in a trash bas- ket. Romeo climbed a rope in order to reach] uliet. Lucifer said that he would rather have a cracker than a sunflower seed. (He got a sunflower seed.) Rob- ert distinguished among a circle, a square, and a star. Lucifer distin- guished among red, yellow, and green. Robert put coins in a piggy bank in- tended for the Wildlife Fund. Cookie waved goodbye. The children got up and left. Miss Johnson removed her glove and joined us for a ride on a monorail that took us through a portion of the zoo called Wild Asia, travelling above open areas in which sika deer, elephants, tigers, and other animals native to the world's largest continent were roaming, stand- ing, or sleeping. The day was balmy. The sky was blue. Miss Johnson told us that she had grown up in Califor- nia, and that she had always known what she wanted to do. "After three years at a state college, I transferred to Moorpark College, near Los An- geles. I enrolled there in a course in ex- otic-animal training and management. It's the only one of its kind in the world. I learned how to work with just about every kind of wild animal-lions, deer, elephants, hyenas, kangaroos, eagles, chimpanzees, snakes. I came here to the zoo last September, and It took me a couple of months to create the bIrd show. I also trained two wom- en to assist me. When those parrots came to the zoo, they didn't have any skills at all." We asked Miss Johnson to ten us something really cunous about an ani- mal. "There's something really curious about rhinoceroses," she said. "People think of them as being so dangerous- charging at you across the veldt, and So forth. But if you tickle one rhino I know in just the right place, behind its foreleg-with just the right amount of tickle-it will go into a blissful hyp- notic state and keel over." Grand Central S UDDENLY, the Municipal Art Society's free weekly hour-long lunchtime walking tours of Grand Central Terminal (meet in front of the new Chemical Bank branch-the one where the tellers' cages look like the windows of a streamlined Pull- man car-at the east end of the main concourse, under the giant Kodak sign, on \\T ednesdays at 12: 30 P.M.) have become such a huge success that John Tauranac has been hoarse for two weeks. T auranac, one of several learned volunteer docents who conduct the tours-he is the author of "Essential New York," a new guidebook to New York structures and to the minds that created them, and is also the principal architect of the city's new subway map, which actually shows where the trains go-had been accustomed to taking groups of about seven, and sometimes, when no one else turned up, only him- self, around the terminal ever since the tours began, quietly, in early 19750 But on the last two Wednesdays a total of two hundred and thirty peo- ple have shown up to be taken to the famous whispering gallery in front of the Oyster Bar (stand in front of one of the four corners under the terra- cotta dome and face the wall, and have a friend face the wall in the corner diagonally opposite; the two of you can then carryon aeon versation in a low voice, despite the bombilation of chatter and coming and going in the space between you), and to saun- ter along a catwalk running right through the middle of the three arched double windows, almost sixty feet high, that pour light into the concourse from Vanderbilt A venue. On one of those Wednesdays, some of the new tour- takers talked along the way about the things that had prompted their interest in learning more about the terminal. A white-haired woman with blue eyes and a purple shirt said, "I've worked near Grand Central and seen it every day for years. It occurred to me that I have always looked at it blindly, not shown it any attention or thought, not looked at it with my eyes." A middle-aged man wearing black WIre glasses and a dark-blue suit said, "E ver since the recent gas shortage, I've been wondenng how a New Yorker should use his energy in the